Terror beyond Kasab

Ajmal Kasab was a foot soldier in a venal chain that runs through terrorist training camps on the outskirts of Pakistan’s major cities, links up with militants in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and ends in Rawalpindi GHQ.

The sanction for terror comes from the very top.

If it did not, Hafiz Saeed would not be allowed to spread his poison openly, thinly disguising the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) as a charitable organization. Without money, arms, training – and sanction – from within the Pakistan establishment, 26/11 would have been impossible to execute.

26/11 was a defining moment. Till then, Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) and military had followed a low-intensity policy of proxy terrorism. The attack on parliament was an exception. Most terror plots were aimed at trains, buses and markets – the poor suffered most and their cases were soon forgotten.

26/11 changed all that. Kasab was caught, imprisoned, tried and executed largely because of the bravery of a few Mumbai policemen, especially Tukaram Ombale who died while arresting him near Girgaum Chowpatty, South Mumbai, as he tried to escape in a hijacked Skoda car.

The three days during which Kasab and nine other Pakistani terrorists held Mumbai hostage have left a scar on the city. Kasab’s execution will not heal it fully till the men who trained him, funded him, indoctrinated him and mentored him are brought to justice.

What does the timing of Kasab’s hanging signify? Consider the context. First, it comes on the heels of the sudden cancellation of Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik’s planned trip to India this week.

Second, it was preceded by an unusually firm statement by the PMO that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would not visit Pakistan in the near future since progress on bringing the perpetrators of 26/11 to book was unsatisfactory.

Third, it represents the quickest decision to reject a mercy petition by an Indian President. Pranab Mukherjee has 19 other mercy pleas before him; 300 convicts are currently on death row. In office for just four months, President Mukherjee has shown a decisiveness absent in his predecessor.

Pakistan was informed of Kasab’s hanging in advance by letter and fax. The High Commission in Delhi reluctantly accepted the communication though Pakistan has long admitted Kasab was its citizen. This continuing pretence of denial is exactly what it seems – pretence. Pakistan’s military establishment is deeply complicit with terrorists of the Laskhar-e-Toiba (LeT) and the JuD.

As David Coleman Headley (original name: Daood Sayed Gilani) and others have testified, senior officers of the Pakistani army and the ISI are directly involved in training, funding and mentoring terrorists for attacks in India.

The intensity and frequency of these attacks have reduced since 26/11 for two reasons.

One, America’s war on al-Qaeda has drawn significant Pakistani military resources and attention away from India to North and South Waziristan. Attacks on Pakistani military targets by the Tehreek-e-Taliban, which is hostile to the Pakistani establishment (unlike the Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks which support Rawalpindi), have further distracted Islamabad.

Two, intense US (and latterly Saudi) diplomatic pressure on Pakistan has led to the deportation of fugitive terrorists like Abu Jundal and Fasih Mohammad from Riyadh. Till last year, Pakistan could count on Saudi Arabia as a source for funds and a safe haven for terrorists. But with change sweeping West Asia, Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi monarchy is under pressure.

Protests in neighbouring Bahrain (which has a Shia majority) were put down with the help of the Saudi military. More protests against dictatorial-monarchies have broken out in the past few days in Jordan, till recently a relatively stable Hashemite kingdom.

Squeezed between the suddenly chastened Saudis and the relentless Americans – their two erstwhile pillars of support – Pakistan’s terror options have narrowed.

India’s growing economic, military and diplomatic clout now presents New Delhi with the opportunity to cauterise the terror threat from Pakistan at its source – Rawalpindi GHQ – where India-centric, Scotch-swilling Pakistani Generals still harbor ill-will over Bangladesh and Kargil and entertain atavistic, mythical notions of Pakistan’s ability to pressurise India with the old tactic of proxy terrorism.

Sadly, while educated Pakistanis form a sizeable peace constituency for India, the majority of ordinary Pakistanis continue to be fed on a diet of anti-India propaganda. The disinformation begins in secondary school with text books spreading anti-India poison. Rising politicians like Imran Khan pander to this populism by harping on Kashmir and treating the medieval Taliban with kid gloves.

Former dictators like Pervez Musharraf, the “butcher of Kargil”, are discredited everywhere except in India where he finds a ready audience for his solutions to the Kashmir problem, including “demilitarisation” and disarming Indian security forces. He does not add that, first, Pakistani-funded terrorists should be disarmed or they will have a free run of J&K.

Musharraf also raises the old myth of 1948-vintage United Nations resolutions on J&K when he knows perfectly well that those resolutions are invalid because they were conditional on Pakistan vacating Pakistan-occupied Kashmir(PoK).

* * * * *

Will there be retaliatory terror attacks on Indian targets by the LeT and JuD following Kasab’s hanging? No more than there would otherwise have been. Terrorists understand the language of strength, not weakness.

What will be the political fall-out on the confidence building measures (CBMs) between the two countries? Again marginal. Pakistan has more to lose than India from CBMs faltering. Kasab was a cog in Pakistan’s terror wheel and Islamabad will not jeapardise the cricket-and-music diplomacy that will unfold this winter. Besides, it has its eye fixed firmly on “resolving” Siachen where it is bleeding men and material.

With Kasab’s execution, the families of the 166 victims of 26/11 have received partial justice. But the puppeteers of 26/11, led by Hafiz Saeed and Zaki ur Rehman Lakhvi, have not yet felt the full force of the law. Till they do, there can be no closure for the victims of 26/11.

And until the factories of terror that dot Pakistan, churning out Kasabs by the dozen, are shut down, India cannot lower its guard either.

Author

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the late industrialist Aditya Birla. After three years with The Times of India and a year with India Today, he founded, at 25, Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering publisher of six specialised journals, including Gentleman, a political and literary monthly (whose senior editors and columnists included David Davidar, Shashi Tharoor, L.K. Advani and Dom Moraes), and Business Computer, in technical collaboration with Dutch media group VNU (renamed The Nielsen Company in 2007). Minhaz is chairman and group editor-in-chief of Merchant Media Ltd. and founding-editor of Innovate, a magazine for US-based CEOs. He heads the group’s think-tank, Global Intelligence Review. Having played tournament-level cricket and tennis – and rhythm guitar for his school rock band – he likes Dire Straits, R.E.M. and Sachin Tendulkar’s straight drives in roughly reverse order.
Follow @minhazmerchant on twitter

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former. . .

From around the web

More from The Times of India

Comments

Top Comment

()

Author

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and the late industrialist Aditya Birla. After three years with The Times of India and a year with India Today, he founded, at 25, Sterling Newspapers Pvt. Ltd., a pioneering publisher of six specialised journals, including Gentleman, a political and literary monthly (whose senior editors and columnists included David Davidar, Shashi Tharoor, L.K. Advani and Dom Moraes), and Business Computer, in technical collaboration with Dutch media group VNU (renamed The Nielsen Company in 2007). Minhaz is chairman and group editor-in-chief of Merchant Media Ltd. and founding-editor of Innovate, a magazine for US-based CEOs. He heads the group’s think-tank, Global Intelligence Review. Having played tournament-level cricket and tennis – and rhythm guitar for his school rock band – he likes Dire Straits, R.E.M. and Sachin Tendulkar’s straight drives in roughly reverse order.
Follow @minhazmerchant on twitter

Minhaz Merchant is an author, editor, columnist and publisher. A recipient of the Lady Jeejeebhoy prize for physics, his books include biographies of former. . .